So-and-So Said It

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Two elderly ladies sought my attention after the meeting.

“Good evening,” I said, turning to them. “I hope you enjoyed the presentation”.

“You were wrong about the age of the earth,” said one of them, who I will call Mrs. Smith. “If you read Genesis 1 properly, you will see that God made the world, and then, later, the earth became formless and void. That doesn’t sound very good. Something went wrong. There was a gap between the first two verses of millions of years.”

I had mentioned during my talk about the semantic range of the Hebrew word hayah, showing that it should be translated as was, unless there was a clear contextual reason to translate it as became.